The New Year will soon be upon us, which means that, for many, the three months leading up to 5th April and the end of the tax year is sufficient time for review and action regarding tax planning.
But, you may be wondering if the General Election on 12th December might require you to bring forward any planning you had been contemplating.
Well, we don’t have the manifestos yet, but we can be pretty sure that tax under a Labour Government or Labour led coalition of some sort (formal or informal) would be very different to that we are currently living with – on all fronts – income tax, capital gains tax, inheritance tax and corporation tax.
From the little we have (largely from papers released at their conferences) the Lib Dems also have some fairly radical ideas on the taxation of income, capital gains and inheritance. Even the Conservatives may decide to make some tax changes – though not so radical.
We reiterate that we do not have the manifestos, but we do know from what’s been said so far in the campaign that both Labour and Conservatives have ambitious spending plans.
The point is that whoever gets into power and especially if we have a Labour Government the reliefs and exemptions currently available are unlikely to get materially better than they are currently.
So, it might be prudent to run a tax year end health check ahead of the election to at least ensure that consideration is given to identifying the reliefs and exemptions available to you and to discuss the relevance and appropriateness of taking action to improve your ‘tax health’, sooner rather than later.
If the only reason action hasn’t been taken to date is just not having ‘got round to it’ then the added incentive that some of the reliefs and exemptions available now might not be after the first Budget – which would probably be in January 20’ – may encourage you to bring forward action that might otherwise have taken place later in this tax year.
Our Tax Year End Planning Checklist is a handy checklist of suggested planning considerations.
If you have a question that arises from review the checklist, please get in touch.
